'The Knick:' Read what others are writing about the new Cinemax medical drama

Steven Soderbergh has emerged from semi-retirement — to which he never apparently fully committed — to direct all 10 episodes of the new medical drama "The Knick." The debut is at 9 p.m. Friday (Aug. 8) on Cinemax, and the power of the pilot script by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler is why Soderbergh got involved.

"I knew that as the first person who got to take a look at it, if I didn't say yes that the second person who was going to see it would say yes," Soderbergh said during the Summer TV Tour in Hollywood. "My whole life I've moved in any direction that I felt was going to excite me and engage me, and it's sort of unfortunate that people have to keep listening to me explain why I went back to work, but I'm glad I did."

The Knick (Cinemax, Fridays at 10 p.m. ET) is a show about the future. It just happens to take place in 1900.

The medical drama, created by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler and produced and directed by Steven Soderbergh, is emphatically a period piece, meticulously produced, capturing turn-of-that-century New York City in all its grimy, typhoid-infected squalor. But this ain't Downton Abbey, and no crumpets shall be served.

Soderbergh shoots, and edits, all this material together masterfully, and he's cleverly brought in his frequent musical collaborator Cliff Martinez to provide the pulsing, wildly anachronistic electronic score. This is a show that doesn't ask its characters to wink at us about the trappings of the period — these are men and women of 1900, who know no other way — but there are some modern flourishes in the way the stories are presented. Soderbergh doesn't go full Baz Lurhmann or Sofia Coppola with the material, but there are occasionally sequences that wouldn't look out of place on "Breaking Bad," and the synthesizers of Martinez's score are a constant reminder that for men like John Thackery, 1900 wasn't the stodgy past, but the thrilling present.